Smarter Cybersecurity - Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare

Cloudflare's network is one of the most heavily trafficked in the world. What are you doing to manage all of that data daily?

We talk about 50 billion cyber attacks on behalf of our customers daily. And if you think about how we've done that is we've built a globally distributed network in 200 cities around the world. So Cloudflare has a point of presence in 200 cities. We're within about 100 milliseconds of 99% of the Internet's population. And if you sort of say, okay, wow, you're really close to where people are connecting online, it's. It becomes much easier to say, hey, how do you solve some of these tricky things that businesses face? How do you make sure they're protected from the cyber attacks? Well, if you take a problem and you divide it up in 200 different pieces, it's actually a lot easier to solve. If you say, wow, I'm building the next mobile app, the next hot mobile app, but it's so slow for all my visitors in Africa. Well, Cloudflare has a network there so that they can just use us to be fast there and they don't have to deal with it, so they can get back to solving real problems, and it just scales naturally globally.

No matter how prepared you seem to be, cyber attacks inevitably occur. So what tools do you offer clients to deal with them?

The cybersecurity industry did itself a DisService the last 10 years, where it was kind of relegated to the security teams, the IT teams, and when something bad happened. And by the way, lots of things happen to every business. Nobody want to talk about it. And I actually think that's really unhealthy. The best leaders, the best companies in the world, have great defenses. They've done the ABCs, and then when something happens, they. They're very fast to respond. They can detect that there was an issue. Just can you detect if you had a problem, or did someone tell you 18 months later, good business leaders are like, oh, yeah, we detected there was an issue. How fast did we respond to get back to business as usual?

There's a lot of worry surrounding user data and the protection of user data. How does the view of this need to change to be able to mitigate these worries?

You know, I think there's actually been some really bad behavior from other tech companies in the industry where they've done some really abhorrent things and people have a right to be upset, and they should be. Having said all that actually is an opportunity for entrepreneurs for the next generation opportunities to say, I'm going to build something different. And so part of if you look at this question, it comes back to business model. How do companies make money? And if companies make money by selling ads, their incentives are very different than if a company doesn't make money from selling ads, if maybe a business pays them or if a consumer pays them. And so part of it comes down to this user privacy. It's what's the business model of the service you're using. And often if the business model comes down to an ad based model, then the business's allegiance lies with the advertisers, not the users. Versus if the consumer is paying for a service, there's usually better alignment. At Cloudflare specifically, our customers are businesses. Whether you're a developer, small business, big company, you buy our services. And we are not an ad based model. And so as the rise of privacy has become more to the forefront, which I think is really important to help counteract some of this bad behavior we've seen, we, we've kind of said how can we launch services that help make our customers more privacy first for their customers and users? And that's something we're proud of. And we've also said how do we launch products that show privacy first? So actually we sell services to businesses, but we actually have two consumer services. And our very first consumer service we launched was how can we make your Internet browsing more private and faster for any human on earth? And it's a service called 1.1.1.1 and we weren't sure whether people would vote with their feet to sign up for the service. Turns out people voted with their feet. Over 15 million people around the world have downloaded 1.1.1 to make their Internet browsing faster and more private. And so people do care about their privacy. And I think entrepreneurs and businesses that create privacy first, businesses with business models that align have a, are part of the future.

You've co founded a multibillion dollar company. What's the key to creating a unicorn?

You know, if I'm an entrepreneur starting a company or I'm thinking about starting a company and I'm like, yeah, I really want to build, I want to make an impact with my business. I want to build a big company, I want to build this multi billion dollar company. You have to service a large market. You think about Cloudflare, we are doing cybersecurity, global performance and reliability for any business on earth, massive market opportunity. And so you need a big market if you're going to build a big company, you have to be able to get great people to come work for you. Really critical, because I don't care how talented you are as a founder, you need a team and you need a whole team rowing in the same direction. Once you have great people working for you, they have to stay, they have to stick around, they have to stick with you. To build it like it's. The retention of that team is really, really important. You need that team rowing in the same direction. You need to point the 40 resources. You have the 100 people on the team, the 200 people growing in the same direction, start middle end shipping, getting projects done to move on to the next thing. So all of a sudden you look back a year later like, wow, we did a lot of things this year because the pace of what you're shipping is so high. Founders who really understand, oh, wow, my business metrics matter. How am I going to be compared to other businesses in my peer set? The sooner you understand that, the better. You allocate resources internally and prioritize what your team should be working on. And you want to not only solve a problem, you want to build a great business around it. And that's when magic happens. Sa.